Hard Drive dilemma, time capsule and Lacie 4Big RAID questions

[Doctorsti]

I am running a 24" 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo iMac and about 2 years ago the drive failed and Applecare put in a 600GB drive for me. I have a time capsule 500GB and as would be expected as my 600GB drive filled the time capsule couldn't keep up.

I also have a Lacie 4Big drive that is 4TB that I was using for archiving video and pictures but I believe one of the drives failed to rebuild and just blinks red so I am going to have to replace one drive on it too.

My question is how should I proceed with upgrading my storage solutions?

For example replace the hard drive in the time capsule with a 2-3TB drive and just replace the time 1TB drive in the Lacie with a another 1TB which would obviously be the cheapest and easiest option but with the 4Big in Raid1 I think I only have like 1.8 or 1.9TB available for storage and it's about 3/4 full.

I think my best option would be to upgrade the drives in the Lacie with 3TB Seagate Barracudas at around 150 each and make it my Time capsule and partition part of it for archiving. I'll have like 6TB of storage then instead of 3 on the time capsule and 2 on the 4Big.

I could then use the time capsule to wirelessly back up my wifes macbook with is currently backed up via time machine to a USB connected drive.

Another option would be to upgrade the drive in the time capsule to 3TB, the drive in the iMac to 2TB and then get just a 1TB drive to replace the 4Big for now.

Any ideas from the experts? I would also like to hear brand and models that I should be looking at for these applications because to me the vast options for hard drives makes my head spin!

 

[fungus]

OP, I have a similar setup to yours. I use a 2TB 2Big for projects/archiving, but I keep it in RAID 0 for speed. The 2Big is then backed up to a 2TB external once/week. I have a external drive attached to a mini running as a server/HTPC which backs up the day-to-day stuff for all three of our machines (mini included).

I've never been comfortable multitasking my backup drives; I like to keep my backups separate from my work. For that reason alone, I would go with your option #2.

As far as drives go, I've always been a fan of Hitachi and that's what I've put in all my externals (3.5"). I can't remember what came inside the Lacie, but it's been running strong for over 2 years now <knocks on wood>

 

[harddrivefailur]

OP, I have a similar setup to yours. I use a 2TB 2Big for projects/archiving, but I keep it in RAID 0 for speed. The 2Big is then backed up to a 2TB external once/week. I have a external drive attached to a mini running as a server/HTPC which backs up the day-to-day stuff for all three of our machines (mini included).

I've never been comfortable multitasking my backup drives; I like to keep my backups separate from my work. For that reason alone, I would go with your option #2.

As far as drives go, I've always been a fan of Hitachi and that's what I've put in all my externals (3.5"). I can't remember what came inside the Lacie, but it's been running strong for over 2 years now <knocks on wood>

I don't want to be an alarmist, but I would say that you should either have a very good backup program in place that continually backs up your drives, or just avoid raid 0 altogether.

We typically see that a lot of these raid configurations fail, and in fact this is probably one of the most popular kinds of raid failures for "consumer users".